More Economic Suffering Due to Obamacare

The Washington Post reports on the ever-growing number of people losing wages and facing pay cuts due to the 2010 healthcare law:

For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut.

Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty course load despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers for large employers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more.

“We work so hard for so little pay,” he said. “You would think they would want to make an investment in society, pay the teachers back and give us health care.”

This month, the Obama administration delayed the employer insurance requirement until January 2015. But Virginia, like some other employers around the country that capped part-timers’ hours in anticipation of the initial deadline, has no plans to abandon its new 29-hour-a-week limit.

The impact on Pace and thousands of other workers in Virginia is an unintended consequence of the health law, which, as the most sweeping new social program in decades, is beginning to reshape aspects of American life. . . .[Even] Democratic-leaning communities, including Dearborn, Mich., and Long Beach, Calif., have imposed caps on part-time workers to keep them below the 30-hour threshold.

Many community colleges are also slashing employee hours to avoid costly Obamacare mandates. Other employers across the country have also stopped hiring because of Obamacare, or have cut full-time workers and replaced them with part-time workers to avoid burdensome mandates contained in the healthcare law.

Earlier, several unions pleaded for fundamental changes to the 2010 healthcare law, saying that major changes, Obamacare will “shatter” employee health benefits, cut employee hours and wages, and “destroy” a “foundation” of America’s middle class.

Dr. Fred Burbank and Dr. Thomas J. Fogerty say that Obamacare is “bad for your health,” and that because of it, “venture capital investment in medical devices has all but ceased,” which will have a  “devastating” effect on medical innovation. Obamacare caused layoffs in the medical device industry through what Minnesota Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) called a “job-killing tax” that will “impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.” In the future, hundreds of thousands of additional people are likely to stop working or scale back their hours due to provisions in Obamacare that discourage certain people from working or earning more money by cutting off their government benefits if they do so.